22 and Still Dumb!

The year of the Christ 2022 is over and yeah I as old as the last two digits of the year. I see this as a boon of being born in year 2000, even if I lose my memories my kin can guess my age from the year. And talking about memories, 2022 was more memorable than 2021 when most of the time I was simply overthinking my life, the future of it atleast. It 2023 now and it’s rewind time for 2022.

Day 1 2022

Funnily enough Jan 1, 2022 was a dark day. I had to spend my time at the police station where an accident case of mine had to be dealt with. I spent that day going back and forth to the police station, the MVD’s office, calling up MVI’s and even grow weary of the Govt Official’s behaviour towards us a common man.

Since these type of things happened on day one of the year, I was kinda afraid if my whole year was going to be a fuckup like this, but it didn’t go beyond these things.

Almost all the days of early 2022 was spent in college and I miss those days. One fun thing I did in Jan 2022 was building a(nother) keyboard. The CRKBD! I’m writing this whole blog on that keyboard right now :p and I’ve wrote another post on the CRKBD in this blog too.

The other stuff is that I didn’t do any code in January. I was in my post burnout phase and it took me a lot of time to get back to that coding mode. But anyways, Jan last year was okay-ish.

I got my driving license suspended for the above accident in February. But I was okay with it because I didn’t do much bike riding after the whole accident thingy. But anyways, I got my license suspended for a month but in the meantime I bought a new bike too. Ironic right?

I got my bike on the last day of February 2022 and for the next 4 days I couldn’t ride it around because of the license suspension and all but yeah after that I rode my bike to my heart’s (and wallet’s) content. I used to go to college everyday till the rest of college on my bike and every Sunday whenever I felt bored, I would just call up my friend and travel 40km to get a tea.

But yeah March was also the time I went on a college trip. We went to Chikmagalur, Dandeli and Gokarna. Those were fun days, like living the moment kinda fun days. The next week after the college trip, I went for IFFK in Thiruvanathapuram. It was a one of a kind experience where I watched a movie sitting on the floor steps of the theatre and sitting in the front row to watch a movie and rinning from theatre to theatre to watch a movie and after IFFK, I started our college bookclub. I had pulled something like “community” (the tv show) rather this was for books than Spanish and yes It didn’t work out much that I planned.

April was kinda meh, nothing exciting but it was also the month I got anxious about my future. I had to start looking for jobs since I wasn’t interested in college placements and also I couldn’t sit for them since I didn’t have enough grades either. But I was kinda okay with that since I had some offers to join as an engineer but all these were verbal and I couldn’t stake my future on these. One fine day Abhishek who was my mentor at Frappe pinged me out of the blue asking if I would be joining Frappe. Coincidence! I said yes but he also told a condition that I should work as an Intern at Frappe for again 2 months since I had to prove myself valuable 😅

On May 1st week I joined Frappe as an intern again in the DevOps team. It was the SRE team last time I was there. Abhishek trained me how to do the DevOps “stuff” and he also Invited me to Bangalore for my training. So there I was trying to handle my internship and my college. As for college, this was the last month of being a college student. It was project time too. The college project we did was a Web Analytics server. I wrote the backend and APIs with Go and the rest of the team worked on the frontend and mobile app. It was like a hackathon project for me using knowledge from my previous hackathon experiences.

The day before the presentation day, we had stayed at my friend’s place and at midnight all of us wanted to have some tea. We just took our bikes and went to town to get some tea. It was the first time I had seen Kottayam town at midnight, it’s not teeming with people unlike other towns but it was beautiful and peaceful. The next day we kinda aced our presentation I guess. Phew and that marked our “practical” engineering in college.

The next big thing for our engineering lives was the final semester exams. This was in the month of June. The intense studiousness at the night before the exam paid off and cleared the 8th semester exams. The next things was the sendoff from College by our juniors. They did it well and I still hold that day to close to my heart. Oh and by the way, I got full time at Frappe and completed college.

Then came July and July came with 2 backpapers and joining at Frappe. I joined Frappe at 5th July. I had wrote my 2nd backpaper on 4th July in the morning and by evening I took the flight to Mumbai to join Frappe. It was the month of firsts. First job, first airplane flight, first time seeing another city on my own and so on and going for a conference.

Mumbai is the land of dreams for so many folks and my grandparents included. I came to Mumbai on the monsoon season and people usually don’t prefer coming to Mumbai during the monsoons. Why? Rains!! Mumbai rains are so notorious for being heavy and yes it was heeavy downpour on all the days I was in Mumbai. But yeah Mumbai is fun. I went to see the Gateway of India, The Mumbai marine drive, The Taj Hotel, CSMT etc and all. Mumbai has one of the cheapest public transport(local trains) and cheaper auto-rickshaws too. The day I turned 22 was the day to come back home and work from home.

The tail end of July took me to Bangalore for IndiaFOSS conference. I volunteered there and met a lot of open source and community legends. I even got to meet one of my idols Kailash Nadh there and he remembered my name when we had a call about a hackathon project years ago. I talked to a shit ton of people those days

August was time for the Frappe offsite. This one was in Lonavala and we drove to Lonavala from Pune via the Pune-Mumbai expressway. It was a gorgeous ride through roads built by cutting through the hills in the western ghats and marvels of human engineering. After the offsite, we stayed in South Bombay and went to the marine drive at midnight and it was still crowded then. Abhishek also took me to explore Mumbai. The Bandra-Worli sea link, Shah-Rukh Khan’s home and the familiar Arabian Sea. It was strange to think this is the same sea I saw whenever I went to Alappuzha or Cherthala or Kochi.

August went on too with the usual uneventfullness. September was time to go to Mumbai again. It was ERPNext conference time. I met a lot of folks who were virtual to me. A lot of new colleagues and a lot of community members. It was totally a fun experience. Even met the guy who is well known in the Mechanical keyboard community in India. The one and only VjFalk. It was even mere coincidence that we met, I was just casually showing off my work to some folks and Falk came in. It is tedious for me to type on my office laptop and I told him I’m not used to this keyboard and I have one split home. We had a wonderful conversation on keyboards after that and the final day of the conference he brought all of his keyboards and even gave me a new Macropad to build. The reviung5! I was planning on building a new keyboard and he just came in and offered a new keyboard PCB with all the required materials. Later in October, I built the KLOR keyboard. Even at ERPNext conference I talked to a shit ton of people too.

October was the month I gave my first conference talk. Funnily enough I had my probation call during the last week of conference and Rushabh(CEO) suggested me to be the DevRel engineer of Frappe since I was an enthusiastic talker and told me to submit a talk for KochiFOSS conference. I talked about Frappe Framework here and I learned a lot why I failed in giving a good talk. Talked to a lot of folks there especially students. And that was the first time I had travelled to Kochi on my bike.

In the last weekend of October, Me and my friends in the SPAMfam went to Munnar. I travelled on my Bike all the way there and it wa s a much needed break for me.

In mid-November I gave my 2nd and improved conference talk. A miniDebConf was happening in Palakkad, Kerala and I had applied for a talk there. It got accepted and I went to Palakkad with my friend who was a Debian Developer. It was a fun and really new experience. I wrote more about it on https://frappe.io/blog .The rest of November wasn’t any fun 😅

December came in really fast and I kinda felt like I lost a sense of time, maybe it’s one of the problems when you’re growing up. Some of the fun things I did in December was going for my senior’s wedding and going to Fort Kochi. Other than these two, I went to Kochi two days in a row. One for DevFest+TinkerSpace Inaugration and the next day for Fort Kochi. The DevFest and TinkerSpace inaugration were on the same day and this was time to rekindle old friendships, met so many people after a long time and talked to all of them. It was so fun jumping from one venue to the other to meet friends and not being anywhere at any given point :p

This is my abridged summary of the year 2022. Here are some other stuff in bullet points I did.

• Gym: Been hitting the gym from May but my body is still the same. While I’m the “socialiest” person you’ll meet, I still sit infront of my computer at home without no one to talk to. So Gym was my social life. I just go there to talk and workout, but it’s mostly talking there.
• Keyboards: Built 3 keyboards this year including a Macropad. The Corne, The KLOR and the Reviung5
• Books: Kinda read 6 books but bought a new book and didn’t finish it
• Desk: Bought a 27 inch monitor from my first salary
• Me: Boring as always. Philosophically absurdist and cognitively dumb af. Also a lot cringe :p Sometimes I get anxious on my future and that fucks up my whole week and yeah same old Athul who just randomly feels like ending everything

But the best of thing that 2022 gave me was even more friends. Friends who’ve taught me, friends who never gave upon me, friends who were proud to say “Oh Athul, yeah he’s my friend”, freinds who were a call away. I hope I had been a good friend to them too. If you are reading this, Thank you ❤️

FIN